Théo Tobiasse, born Tobias Eidesas in 1927 in Jaffa - then city of the British Mandate of Palestine-, painter, designer and French sculptor.

Small son of Chaïm (Carlos) Eidesas and Brocha (Berta) Slonimsky originating from Kaunas in Lithuania, the family encountered material difficulties and decided to return to Lithuania, finally reaching Paris in 1931 where his father typographer found work in a Russian printing press.

Théo Tobiasse soon showed willingness for drawing and painting, and during a visit to the 1937 Special Exhibition, held in Paris, he was amazed by the painting of Raoul Dufy La Fée Électricité / The Electric Fairy.

The death of his mother (in June 1939) followed by the outbreak of World War II, the German occupation in Paris, wearing the yellow badge and his inscription in the National School of decorative arts rejected for racial reasons, convulsed his life. He enrolled in a private advertising design course on Boulevard Saint-Michel, which he left nine months later because, escaping the Winter Velodrome raid in July 1942, his family was forced to hide in an apartment in Paris for two years. With the liberation of Paris, he quickly began a career as an advertising graphic designer with the art printer Draeger, and he also made cardboards for upholstery, theater sets and Hermès shop windows in the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

In 1950, he obtained French nationality and settled in Nice in Alpes-Maritimes, where he continued his career as a graphic designer.

Albert von Keller, German painter born in 1844 in Gais, Switzerland. He specialized in portraits and indoor scenes. Female figures are a prominent feature of his work.

He was one of eight children born to Caroline Keller; who was divorced at the time of his birth. As was customary, she had resumed the use of her maiden name. Her ex-husband's brother may have been his true father. When he was three, after several moves, the family settled in Bayreuth where he attended primary school and took piano lessons. In 1852, his mother became a citizen of Bavaria and, by extension, so did he. Sometime in mid 1854, they relocated to Munich and he was enrolled at the Maximiliansgymnasium. He graduated in 1863 and transferred to Ludwig Maximilian University to study law.

After 1865, he decided to pursue a career in art instead, but spent only a short time at the Academy of Fine Arts. He made numerous study trips throughout Germany, France, Italy and the Low Countries. From 1867 he worked at several different studios throughout Munich, including that of Arthur von Ramberg, where he drew nude studies. He had his first showing at the Glaspalast in 1869 and became a member of Allotria, an artists' association, in 1873.

In 1878, he married Irene von Eichthal (1858-1907). He would eventually paint over forty portraits of her. Their first son died as an infant. Their second son, Balthasar, was born in 1884, but died in 1906, shortly before his mother.

He exhibited at the Salon for the first time in 1883, while living in Paris. In 1886, he became a member of the new "Munich Psychological Society"; actually a group devoted to the paranormal, founded by Albert von Schrenck-Notzing. Soon he began representing parapsychological motifs, connected to Christian themes, with visions and hallucinations. In 1892, he was one of the co-founders of the Munich Secession and served as Vice President from 1904 to 1920. He was also a board member of the Deutscher Künstlerbund. In 1898, he received the Knight's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Bavarian Crown, which entitled him to use the noble "von" in his name.

Jean Pierre François Lamorinière or Jan Pieter Frans Lamorinière, Belgian landscape painter born in 1828 in Antwerp, best known for his realistic depictions of landscapes in his home country. His work is situated between the previous generation of the Romantic landscape painters and the Realist landscape.

He commenced his studies at the Antwerp Academy of Fine Arts with the sculptor Joseph Geefs but after a few weeks he started to study in the studio of Emmanuel Noterman, a painter and printmaker known for his genre scenes with animals. He also studied under the prominent marine painter Jacob Jacobs known for his scenes of southern ports and landscapes. Lamorinière started to practice outdoor painting in the immediate vicinity of Antwerp. He exhibited his first work, a Sunset (now in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) in Antwerp in 1648. He is believed to have worked some time in Barbizon, where the painters of the Barbizon school Théodore Rousseau and Jean-François Millet had made their homes and worked. It is not clear when or how long he stayed there but one work dated to 1854 is called Effect of the morning on a forest in Barbizon.

From the mid 1850s the artist starts to gain success thanks to the support of the Brussels art dealer Gustave Couteaux. The future Leopold II of Belgium purchased one of his works through Couteaux. In 1860 he was granted the Order of Leopold, a Belgian national honorary order of knighthood. He came into contact with the London-based Belgian dealer Mr. Gambart. He later visited England and around 1865 several paintings of the forest of Burnham near London by his hand are recorded.

In 1866 Lamorinière married Henriette Lavaux, and also starts to travel to find new subjects in Les Fagnes (1867), the banks of the Meuse (1868-1869), Germany (1869) and from the early 1870s he spent annually several months on the island Walcheren in the Netherlands. He exhibited in Vienna, Prague, Paris, Rotterdam and Amsterdam and painted in these locations when he travelled there. He returned often to paint in the border town of Putte, Kapellen where in the mid 1870s he acquired a residence called The Pavillion.

Jean Pierre François Lamorinière was among a large number of Antwerp artists who established the Vereeniging der Antwerpsche etsers or l’Association des aquafortistes anversois ('Association of Antwerp Etchers') founded in 1880.

He held his first exhibition in London at only nineteen years old, and from that point, his career and reputation quite rapidly developed. In London, Tindle befriended a circle of artists that included Francis Bacon, John Craxton, Lucian Freud, John Minton and Keith Vaughan. All were older than him, and very much established. The example they provided, as serious and committed painters, proved important to Tindle's own sense of himself as an artist. Several of his peers - Bacon, Freud and Minton certainly - influenced his work technically and stylistically, as can be seen in Tindle's paintings from the 1950s and 1960s.

For the first two decades of the Artist's career, his painting was in transition, as he moved gradually towards a more crisp articulation of form coupled with a more restrained handling of paint. Then, in the early 1970s, he began to use the painstaking technique of traditional egg tempera, in paintings that were noticeably more detailed than his previous work in oils. Among the earliest of Tindle's tempera paintings is a portrait of his son, 'John' (1973), though the Artist went on to produce further portraits, landscapes and still life paintings in the medium. These are often intensely detailed, and the products of many hours intensive work.

Certain subjects and motifs recur in Tindle's work: windows, doorways, mirrors and screens, forming pictures within pictures. They provide a subtle theatricality, one that 'toys with the idea of realism' as the Artist has stated.

Amongst Tindle' s most eminent portrait commissions was to paint the actor Dirk Bogarde for the National Portrait Gallery in 1985, for which Bogarde sat over several days at his house in the South of France.

Philip Alexius de László (Fülöp Elek László), Anglo-Hungarian painter born in 1869 in Budapest, known particularly for his portraits of royal and aristocratic personages.

He was apprenticed at an early age to a photographer while studying art, eventually earning a place at the National Academy of Art, where he studied under Bertalan Székely and Károly Lotz. He followed this with studies in Munich and Paris. László's portrait of Pope Leo XIII earned him a Grand Gold Medal at the Paris International Exhibition in 1900. In 1903 László moved from Budapest to Vienna. In 1907 he moved to England and remained based in London for the remainder of his life, although endlessly travelling the world to fulfill commissions.

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